There are many tools in my programming toolbox, but one that I've felt is missing is constraint and logic programming. I've done a spot of Prolog and played with some inference systems of various types ... but even when I run into something where I think it's the right hammer... I don't have a go-to tool.

I got The Reasoned Schemer a while back, hoping to use it to learn clojure's core.logic or similar, but the writing still KILLS me. Hate it so much. It is like the worst extreme sort of Socratic Method that I can imagine, literally everything has two columns of question and answer. But the QUESTIONS are obtuse! Working through it that way is not the sort of enlightenment that I'm going for ... I don't want to apply a unification algorithm on my understanding of logic programming with the contents of the book! The programming system might be "backwards" that way, but my way of learning isn't.

Anyway. One dumb thing that I had a hard time getting over was things ending in -o, like conso and emptyo. But tonight I had a breakthrough! See those 'o' things, according to the internets, are supposed to be sort of like question-marks except describing a goal. So now if I read the 'o' as '-objective' (as in, "goal") then they sound much better. cons-objective, empty-objective. Declaring the goal of the statement.

I guess I should go back and try reading The Reasoned Schemer with that in mind, and see if it makes me less angry :)